Everyday People

by Stewart O'Nan

  “That depends on the judge, but I’d say that’s rare in this type of case.”

  He had to sign a form on the clipboard, and then he was free to go, suddenly outside and in the Big Baby, shaking from the swiftness, the finality of the whole thing. He wondered what they were doing to the boy, if they would take his clothes away and put him in a cell, call his mother. He resented the boy even more for forcing him to do this. He didn’t want to, even after seeing the truck. He had no choice.

  Back home, he thought it wasn’t right that he should feel bad after what had happened. He wondered if Vanessa or whoever it was that called felt the same way. Probably not.

  No, probably, because they knew his people.

  He called Sal and asked him if he’d done anything with the truck.

  “You just told me not to.”

  “Hold on to it, all right?”

  “Make up your mind.”

  “A day or two,” Tony said. “I’m in no condition to make a decision here.”

  He told Renée everything over dinner, and found himself downplaying how bad the truck was. She asked how much it would cost, and he said Sal couldn’t give him a number.

  “I knew they’d find it,” she said.

  “And someone did turn him in. You know that wouldn’t happen around here.”

  She pointed her fork at him, chewing. “Around here no one would steal it.”

  “Someone called, that’s all I’m saying.”

  “Why do I think you’ll listen to me? Because maybe I’m your daughter?”

  “I listen to you all the time—what do you think, I don’t?”

  “Ahh,” she said, and dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “You’d be back there tomorrow if it was running.”

  It was true, he thought, if the weather was good enough. Why did it surprise him that his daughter knew her father? At one time she hadn’t. That was past.

  The next day it was brilliant. All afternoon the temperature climbed, the sun cutting in the windows, angling down the hall so it lit a strip of his dresser. The butterflies came off, leaving a gray patch of adhesive he scrubbed with rubbing alcohol; already the cut was healing. He pulled on his work clothes—the white pants and the shirt with his name sewn in red over the heart, the white gloves—and made sure he had enough change for the apron. He took the Big Baby, a cooler in the trunk, filling it with popsicles at the Giant Eagle.

  He turned down Spofford and saw the children chasing each other along the sidewalk, jumping double-dutch, a group of mothers and older girls sitting on the steps in the sun, enjoying the last of Indian summer. He slowed and put his captain’s hat on, rolled his window down and stopped in front of them. He wished he had his bells, but his horn made them turn around. They gave him this look like Who are you? No one moved until he got out of the car to open the trunk. Then they recognized him.

  The mothers stood up, digging in their pockets like always. The children quit their games, dropped their balls and jump ropes and came running, laughing and jostling and calling his name. “Candyman!” they shouted, “Candyman!”

  “Yes, children,” Tony said, as they flocked around him. “Yes. The Candyman is here.”

  THE PAYBACK

  EVERY TUESDAY AND Thursday after work he went with Chris in the city van, bumping his chair down the front stairs of their building while Chris lay back like an astronaut, staring up at the sky. It was not his choice; Eugene had gotten a job out at the airport, Jackie was back on first shift. Five days a week, until dinner, it was just Chris and him.

  Besides this trip, Chris only left the house with Vanessa, Saturdays, their walk in the park. The city had finally started work on the lift, the workers mysteriously appearing one morning, then gone the next. Harold thought Chris had gained weight, his head resting on an extra lip of chin, but didn’t mention it to Jackie. At rehab he was learning how to do for himself, cooking on a special stove he could reach, doing laundry in an ingenious pair of machines, but at home Jackie didn’t let him near the dirty clothes, left him lunches already plastic-wrapped for the microwave. Harold was just as guilty, popping up from the couch during commercials to see if Chris wanted anything.

  He didn’t. He stayed in his room, working on his mural. He’d taped together pages from his big sketchpad and tacked them across the back wall at chest level so he could lie on his bed and pencil in figures. There were famous people and people like Bean. “And right there,” he’d say, “I’m going to put in Benjamin Davis.”

  “Who?” Harold would say, and Chris would show him a picture from one of the books Vanessa brought over. The face on the wall looked exactly the same, but of the thirty people so far, Harold only recognized Bean, Minister Farrakhan with his big-ass glasses, and Curtis Martin, number 28 of the Patriots, who grew up here. He thought of his own father, how disappointed he’d be that Harold had wasted his education. He had no excuses, only a few useless tales of Vietnam—and actually they were from Thailand, from the airbase where as a mechanic he assisted the plane captain of an A-6, bucking rivets and drizzling stripped fasteners with Loctite so they didn’t pop during bombing runs. He’d had a shot at college when he came back, VA benefits, but it seemed childish after Thailand, so he got a job, married, raised his children. It was a full life, despite what his father or Dre might say. There was still some honor in it that might be salvaged, if he could just keep his eye on what was important.

  That was his hope now, especially on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and today, sitting in the van with Chris, he suddenly felt calm, at peace, as if the war inside him between Dre and Jackie had been decided (not by him, he couldn’t say that, but by events) and he’d been given a fresh start. He honestly felt, for an instant as they turned off Penn Circle, that the life he needed to live was the one he desired, that he would grow into it like a beautiful suit. Beside him, Chris sat hunched over a book in his chair, old photographs of jazz greats, some of them from Pittsburgh, like Roy Eldridge there.

  Harold pointed at Little Jazz. “Your grandfather used to go see him at the old Hurricane Lounge. He’d come through four, five times a year when his mother was still alive.”

  “You ever hear him?”

  “Few times. Man could blow fire.”

  Chris seemed happy at the fact, impressed, and as he turned the pages, tipped the book toward Harold to ask if he’d seen Erroll Garner, Stanley Turrentine, Ahmad Jamal. He nodded, told stories, though mostly they were secondhand. His father had heard them, an aficionado, his 78s clean as dishes. He’d hole up in his study and crank the Victrola, sit at his desk, smoking and nodding along with solos blown years ago. When he died, his mother drove the collection over to the church rummage sale in the back of the wagon, as if glad for the opportunity to clean out the house. How many thousands of dollars? Harold had been in Thailand, though the distance didn’t matter; they’d hardly talked since he quit school to enlist. Despite everything, his father would be pleased that Harold was sharing some of him with his own son, and this seemed further proof of the rightness of his new life.

  At the rehab he watched Chris struggle with a device like they used in old grocery stores to reach things on the top shelf. It was about ten feet long and retractable, and had a pistol grip you squeezed. They were doing it in a model kitchen, just one wall; the thing was supposed to save you from having to roll back and forth all the time. As he watched Chris fish for a pepper shaker, his own face wrinkled in concentration, his own fingers clenched an invisible grip, and when the shaker fell and spilled a spray across the stovetop, like Chris, he wanted another chance.

  This was what a father was supposed to do, he thought, not the other thing. Was it so hard to remember? And yet at times he wished he was outside, lost in a cigar, night falling behind the streetlights, the steeple of Presby a black knife against the sky.

  They couldn’t fix Chris; the money wasn’t the problem.

  Chris gripped the pepper shaker, hit the button so the arm retracted, then slowly, carefully, dropped th
e entire thing into the boiling pot of noodles.

  “Fuck this,” he said, and made to spin away, but his therapist shoved the brake on so he froze.

  “Try that again,” Willa Mae said, tough, as if he’d meant it personally. She was one of those wiry, sexless women Harold had always been afraid of. Dried-up-looking, skin grainy and flaking to ash on her hard forearms. Women like that took a switch to their kids, killed their own chickens. She plucked the shaker from the pot and set another on the counter, this one a little closer, the angle that much easier.

  Chris lifted the device like a speargun, touching the button so the slide inched its way over the counter. When he was close, he opened the hinged gripper. Clicked the button once, twice, little baby steps, afraid he’d knock it over. Chris was getting tired; the gripper wavered. Another touch of the button. Harold tilted his chin, giving it some English, and it bracketed the pepper neatly. Chris pulled the trigger.

  “Beautiful,” Willa Mae said. “Now bring it back and you’ll be all done.”

  Chris didn’t acknowledge her, just thumbed the button so the shaker zipped back to him. He swiveled in his chair, facing the stove, and, turning one fist like jerking a kite away from a tree, added a dash of pepper to the water.

  “Very good, Chris,” she said.

  “Nice,” Harold added, patting his shoulder, but Chris just handed the device to her.

  In the van, Harold said Willa Mae thought he was making real progress.

  “Oh yeah,” Chris said. “I’m gonna be the next Chef Boyardee.”

  Back home, Jackie had left a chicken pie in the oven and a note by the phone; she and Eugene were at church, her at choir and Eugene running his new youth group. Harold knew this; it was just her way of saying she was thinking of him, implying she forgave him. Generous of her, and kind to remind him again, as if for one merciful second he might forget. He laid out the plates and the two of them sat at the kitchen table. And this too was right, that he should have to face his failings instead of running away, outside, into the night or someone else’s arms. He didn’t know what to say to Chris, never had, and now most of the usual subjects seemed cruel—What did you do today? What are you going to do tomorrow?—and so Harold relied on the two things Chris was still interested in.

  “Who’d you draw today?” he asked.

  “Elijah McCoy.” Chris let it sit there, teasing him. He swept his food in, his mouth low to the plate. It was one reason he was getting so big, he ate way too fast.

  “Okay,” Harold said, “I don’t know him.”

  “He invented the automatic oiler for train engines. People tried to copy his design but theirs always broke, so to make sure they got his, the mechanics would ask for the Real McCoy. That’s where that comes from. You learn about him in Black History Month, in school.”

  “Not when I went to school.”

  “What did you learn?” Chris asked, and Harold had to think. It was so long ago.

  “Not much,” he said. He’d wanted to say it like a joke, but it didn’t come out that way. “So,” he said, “are you and Vanessa doing anything special this weekend?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “She’s coming over though.”

  “We’ll probably go to the park.”

  “Good,” Harold said, trying not to be too much of a cheerleader.

  “I’m done,” Chris said, and set his napkin on the table.

  “I’ll get your plate.”

  “That’s all right,” Chris said, and Harold knew he shouldn’t have offered. He ate while Chris maneuvered around the table, the chair whirring, his plate in his lap. “I’m going to go work a little.”

  “Okay,” Harold said. He watched him fit the chair through the door, then turn sideways so he could close it. In a minute his music came on, thumping the walls. Harold looked at the mound of chicken pie left in front of him. The Real McCoy, huh? He gently laid down his fork, stood up and scraped the plate into the garbage. He even did the dishes slowly, brooding over them though there was no point. Being here was his choice, Dre always said; now he believed it, at times even saw it as honorable, yet when Harold dropped his guard, he pictured the days marching on like this, his life an endless series of tiny self-denials chipping away at his heart, sadness and rainy days his one comfort. Pitiful. He remembered wrestling with Dre in his sunny sheets, drinking naked at his table, laughing at Sister Payne’s dog yapping at them. When was the last time he’d been happy like that?

  Life was not about happiness, he thought on the couch. A man had obligations. A father had responsibilities. He had the TV on, a bad reflex. He never really watched it, it just flowed past, eating and tracking time like some loud, expensive clock. Someone passed in the hall, and he looked toward the door, panicked for a second that it would open and he’d be caught.

  But he’d done nothing wrong. It was a habit now, feeling guilty. Even the night he came home late from the Liberty—okay, he’d had way too much, but it wasn’t like he was with anyone except Earl, telling him he needed to close up, to go home while he could still walk. Even that night he wasn’t completely surprised to find her waiting up for him. He didn’t see her at first, so drunk his eyes only focused on what was right in front of him (the key, the wandering doorknob and keyhole), but then he heard her long-drawn snoring—like a wet undershirt slowly being torn to shreds—and found her on the couch. In the deep cup of his lush, sentimental buzz, he thought it was nice of her, waiting up, sweet like she could be (it had been years, so his own hope now surprised him, seemed equally sweet), and he sat down beside her, careful not to crush her arm. For some reason she had a knife in her hand, and he removed it. “Dangerous,” he said, carrying it to the sink, puzzled but not yet questioning its presence, just accepting it and acting, following logic as in a dream. He understood only when she woke up and began hitting him—no, really after that, when he could decode what she was screaming at him. Lying motherfucker. No-good two-timing dog just like her father. Worthless piece of shit.

  “Wait,” he said, “hold up,” trying to stop her flashing arms, but it was dark and a fist caught his nose, crushing it down, hot, bone and cartilage twisting, a feeling he knew from so long ago, so far within his body’s memory that he could not stop his own fists from instantly finding its source. Thank God he’d only hit her in the chest, had caught himself immediately. She cried, wailed like she’d been shot, and he was saying he was sorry, baby, please baby you know I didn’t mean it, breathless, and then Eugene had him by the neck, slammed back against the wall as if he’d witnessed everything.

  “Let me go, son,” he said.

  “You come to me next time,” Eugene said, and pushed him away.

  Chris’s light was on; he was calling, asking what was happening.

  “Nothing,” Eugene said. “Daddy’s drunk.”

  Son of a bitch, if he could have that one night back.

  He couldn’t. He could never apologize enough for it to anyone, least of all his sons. Every morning when she got dressed after her shower, he saw the bruise he’d left, just above her left breast, just below her shoulder, wide as a pie plate, a bull’s-eye still changing colors. His nose was fine, not a thing wrong with it. What would his father have said, him striking a woman. There was no man lower.

  What would he say about Dre? At times, months ago, in the haze of love’s first dreamy intensity and surrender, he imagined his father might be like himself—that, away from the daily punishment of his mother’s high hopes and disappointment in him, he found some comfort in the arms of another. All right, yes, he could admit it: another man. Wasn’t his reserve, his fastidiousness and personal privacy, the sign of something? He was certainly not common (for that very reason would be disappointed in him). Now though, he could not see any chain of reasoning that led him to that conclusion, only high spirits and wishful thinking, the hope that his father’s life was more than his own, not just a war with his mother he was bound to lose. It wasn’t realistic, this hope: He wante
d his father to be freer than he was. Now he thought of him closing the door to his study as a way of barricading himself in, and wished he’d been able to help. He imagined some collector still owned the records, picked up cheap at the rummage sale, kept his special treasures cataloged, the sleeves wrapped in plastic, probably never played them.

  The TV slogged along, a swamp of commercials. ER was on in a few minutes, so he got up and paced around the kitchen like a security guard, making sure everything was neat for her. On the top shelf of the right-hand cabinet his bottle of Johnny Walker waited patiently, strictly forbidden, the pencil line on the side proof of his selflessness. Crumbs huddled under the toaster oven, and he wiped them away with a wet paper towel.

  He tucked his shirt in, looking around the living room. The arms of the couch were going shiny, the TV ugly, at least ten years old. Next to the end table the rug was stained where Chris had spilled a glass of grape juice a few years ago, and Harold thought of his mother’s formal living room (never used) with its intricate Persian rugs, the almost sterile cleanliness she insisted on. His father’s study was a mess, and every spring he had to defend it, his mother standing at the open door in her apron, threatening to take care of it if he didn’t. Out back she hung the rugs from the line and gave Harold the wire beater; an hour later, after his arms had turned to clay, she came out and made clouds jump from the Tabriz. Trumpet vines twined around the garage’s downspout, flowering in the heat of summer, and his father would take them driving along the river in the Mercury, cool air rushing through the windows, his mother holding her hat on her lap, the ribbon flapping, trying to fly out. What had happened that those people seemed so foreign to him, their existence strange, barely to be believed? Something had slipped, he thought, missed somewhere. There had to be a mistake.

  He could not be thinking this when Jackie came home, so he banished it, turned his attention to ER, one of the few shows he actually watched with interest. He sat up straight, his posture another sign he wasn’t thinking of the other woman, that his confession had washed him clean. She’d been greedy for details (later that same night), and so he’d chosen a woman from work, absolutely imaginary, and when he saw how intently she was listening, he knew Sister Payne hadn’t suspected anything. He fabricated their affair, yet in a way he was telling the truth; he never strayed far from what had actually happened between him and Dre. And they had broken it off, they hadn’t talked in weeks—the important things were true, or had been then.